jfleck at inkstain

A few thoughts from John Fleck, a writer of journalism and other things, living in New Mexico

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: The Great Banana Peel Sticker War

Now that I get to be an occasional columnist in the newspaper, it’s remarkable how much of the work that seems appropriate in that new (for me) form builds off of something that started here, as a simple riff. To the extent that I’m getting my legs beneath myself as a columnist, it’s pretty clear [...]

California Flooding in a Warming World

Jay Lund and colleagues have modeled a range of possible impacts of climate change on flood flows in California. From a nice summary on the UC Davis California WaterBlog: Warming generally worsened flood inflows into reservoirs.  Even with less precipitation, warmer conditions often increased flood inflows to reservoirs.  When more precipitation fell as rain, rather [...]

Water in the desert: blackwater edition

A river is not just in one place. It extends in time up and down its watershed. Last night, Daniel Porter at the Albuquerque National Weather Service office sent out an alert of possible flooding on Peralta Canyon, which enters the Rio Grande about 40 miles north of Albuquerque. Its watershed was burned in the [...]

On borrowing and the richness of language

One of the things I love about language is its staggering combinatorial possibilities. I revel in a Google game – picking a seemingly ordinary phrase and doing a search to see how many times it has appeared in the vast body of language indexed by the search engine. It is amazing how relatively few times [...]

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: water policy and the endangered species act

New Mexico’s in the midst of a tense and interesting discussion about the Rio Grande silvery minnow, the Endangered Species Act and managing the Rio Grande. I’ve got a post up over at the work blog going meta on the underlying issues – why I think ESA discussions have become our proxy discussions for big [...]

The case for calling it a “Peripheral Thingie”

John Bass today argues for clarity in our use of language when talking about a water conveyance around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta: Could I ask that Dan Bacher and those he quotes use the term “canal” when referring to a canal to take water around the Delta, the term “tunnel” for the other option under [...]

Bonus water as seen from space

From NASA’s Earth Observatory, Lake Powell at Hite this month compared to a year ago:   h/t David Appell

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Bonus Water on the Colorado

Over at the Lane Center, a look at what the extra water on the Colorado River means: While Colorado Basin water users had survived 11 years of drought without suffering shortages, simply by draining their two big reservoirs, US Bureau of Reclamation calculations raised the clear possibility that by next year, the first ever shortage [...]

Lee’s Ferry

Because you can never have too many pretty pictures of the Colorado River:

Water is beautiful

I was really struck by something in this video. Not the PR message, though I’ve no doubt San Franciscan water the cleanest water in the whole world! No, it’s the remarkable beauty of water.

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